Summer of Lego

I have been able to relax a little more this summer with my teaching load reduced and the research at DSU manageable for the first summer session. I am looking forward to the class on "big data" taught by Dr. Deokar. I think it will be interesting based on some research projects I am in currently and a few abstract proposals which are out right now for review. My students for the UTA corrections course are doing very well and are highly interactive.

This has left me some free time. Lately I've been back into designing Lego creations almost exclusively. I have a pinterest page up with almost 530 unique awesome lego creations. This page is updated daily from various sources like Brickshelf and MOCpages. The pinterest page can be found right here. As soon as I can get my MOC pages recreated and set up again the additional pages for "MOC" and "My Collections" will be updated as well, each with their own special pinterest page respectively. I find this hobby highly therapeutic and easy to maintain while listening to lectures and audio texts. It also helps with my insomnia.

The current goal is to rebuild all my old sets. This is almost complete as I have a few sets outstanding with missing pieces which need to be replaced. I am currently working on the 575 Coast Guard Station, which was the very first set I ever had, surprisingly enough I still have quite a bit of the bricks for that set. In addition I want to submit a Lego Cuusoo project just to say I could (bragging rights only).

I will say that I reached a milestone with the use of Lego as a teaching device. I actually managed to help a student understand the ideology of States' Rights with the use of Lego Mini-figs. Yes, I actually did this, and I revel in the fact it made sense in context. I will never again say that I have too many police Lego sets now. I have managed to move the entire collection into my office at UTA.

Hopefully the second summer session will go as smoothly as the first.

Yahoo Pipes and Zapier

I have been trying to get this blog updated weekly or bi-weekly, but my schedules at UT Arlington and Dakota State have not afforded me much time. I did manage to come up with a nice little combination of services to solve a problem the other day.

If you are looking for a quick and easy method for content delivery, do not forget Yahoo! Pipes. I am grabbing and parsing information from Pipes and feeding that to Zapier for quick email delivery. Although the documentation for pipes could be somewhat more inclusive and more detailed, like say a regular language reference, it's enough to get the idea and testing phases completed.

Zapier is amazing stuff. What I'm most interested in with Zapier is the ability to integrate ticket items into service suites for technology help desk collaboration softwares. The real strength lies there in my humble opinion.

In addition I will also say that it would be nice to have some integration to more traditional suites like Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, without having to rely on RSS or Atom feeds, or some others manually created XML.

Side Note: turned several students and at least one GRA on to Mendeley. I love watching their eyes light up and the look of relief when they see what it can do. Also I discovered that Blackboard and YouTube go well together when trying to convey an idea to 200+ students. I cannot imagine how many email I saved myself this week.

Ok that's it for this week. No cool logo, but we will see what next week brings.